Guide to Advanced Playbooks: Offense
So you want to take advantage of Advanced Playbooks but don't know where to get started? This is the guide for you. Playbooks are more or less a compilation of what plays will be called depending on the scenario. A scenario can designate simple situations in the game such as "1st down" or "2nd down with 14 yards to go" as well as fairly complicated situations such as "4th and 1, within the opponents 40, 2nd quarter, less than 2 minutes to go." A successful playbook will have all of the following scenarios accounted for and ready to go. Since defining and establishing these scenarios is a time consuming, almost infuriating process the following guide advises you to simply copy over an existing playbook complete with all the relevant scenarios to act as a template in which to work from. Importing a Playbook To begin, you must first "copy" an existing public playbook into your own list of playbook. DeepRoute allows users up to 12 different playbooks so choose any of the existing empty slots, click on the o, and finally on the c to be taken to a page where you can designate which public playbook to copy on over. For your convenience, the following playbook has been made available to you by wolfpac255: *WOLFPACS OFF PB TEMPLATE (Real Battlecreek Wolvernines) Please go ahead and copy over this playbook. This playbook is INCREDIBLY comprehensive and contains pretty much EVERYTHING that you need. It might seem overwhelming at first but please note that the majority of scenarios in this playbook are currently inactive so you can start editing the playbook one step of the time. Don't want to worry about 3rd downs? Just edit the 1st down scenarios and let the default playbook kick in for 3rd down situations. Editing the Playbook Once you have the playbook copied over, go ahead and click on the playbook title to edit it. Once in the playbook edit screen you'll be faced with a lot of information. The only things you need to worry about on the left hand column (highlighted yellow in Figure 2) are the scenario drop-down indicator, the "confirm this scenario button" and the "active?" indicator. Ignore the rest of the information for now -- they simply modify the meaning of the scenario and have already been preset by wolpac255. To begin editing your playbook, simply select the scenario you wish to edit (start with 1st down GENERAL) and make sure that such scenario is active (Active? "YES"). After ensuring the above, you should focus on the right hand panel otherwise described as "Offensive package options." This designates the probability that a given package will be selected given the scenario. So, in the example shown in Figure 2, the package T 1 2 3 4 (A) (1 tight end and 4 wide receivers) will be selected 60% of the time during 1st down situations. Most players prefer to keep their passing plays in the (A) package and their running plays in the (B) package. This allows players to keep track of the run/pass balance without going crazy. In this case, it's pretty obvious that on 1st downs (hopefully the majority of your offensive snaps will be on first down) the offense will pass the ball 60% of the time. This is probably a very bad idea unless, of course, you're the New England Patriots. Selecting the Plays In Figure 3, we have selected the package H F 1 2 3 (B) (1 halfback, 1 fullback, 3 wide receivers) and are looking at the individual plays that can be run out of this particular package. As you can see, there are 3 logical formations that can be run out of the H F 1 2 3 package: I Formation, Pro Set, and 3 Wideouts. In this particular playbook, we are running the formation "3 Wideouts" 80% of the time. As you can probably infer the percentages therefore are multiplied against each other. Pay attention to these percentage numbers as they can have a significant effect on how often a play is selected. This is why the majority of players choose to keep all their passing plays and running plays in different designated (A)/(B) packages. This way we can easily see that on 1st down we will pass 60% of the time (regardless of the passing play) and run 40% of the time (regardless of the running play). Please note that you'll go through this whole editing process for each conceivable scenario! While time consuming, it affords you maximum flexibility. Remember that all of the changes that we are making right now only apply to 1st down situations. Evaluating the Play When evaluating the play be sure to view the play "after the snap" to see the different route trees and blocking assignments that will occur after the ball is snapped. In Figure 4, we're looking at the 3 Wide "H Sweep Right" play out of the H F 1 2 3 package. Like in Madden, the HB running with the ball will have his route marked as yellow. As you can see here , we have a lot of plays blocking (as is typical of a run play). For this play to be successful you must have #A decent HB. #A decent FB with good runblocking skills. #A WR1 with good runblocking skills. #A WR2 with good runblocking skills. Review each play to determine what key attributes will be needed from your players. Will your WRs be running short routes that rely on lots of quick cuts (First Step + Footwork) or will they be running fly patterns down the field (Speed)? Saving the Scenario Once you have finished editing your packages and their individual plays go ahead and confirm the scenario BEFORE SAVING THE PLAYBOOK. Remember Figure 2? You must click on "confirm this scenario" after editing the scenario before you click on the button "SAVE PLAYBOOK" towards the bottom left handside of the playbook editing module. Please, please, please do not forget to confirm saving your scenario before you save your playbook. Also, so you don't lose your work, please save your playbook BEFORE 12:00 Midnight, EST. There is a very irritating bug which will tell you that you do not have playbooks active if you attempt to save a playbook after midnight, and cause you to lose all your changes. This has happened at least once to almost everybody, so be careful to save what you have around 11:50 and don't resume until after 12:00. If it is already past 12:00 EST, then keep your current playbook open (do NOT save it) and open it again in a new window, allowing you to copy over your changes by hand instead of tryign to do it all again from scratch. You can then safely save the one you opened after midnight, and close the older one.